Toro Y Moi Goes to Space

You know Chaz Bundick as chillwave outfit Toro Y Moi. You know him for his signature clear-framed glasses. But right now he's not Toro Y Moi (and he doesn't have those glasses any more). Today he's teamed up with the Mattson 2 and gone full-on psych-surf-jazz—and the result is familiar and distant and totally thrilling.

New Age is back. Not that it ever really died, but lately psychedelia has quietly re-infiltrated America. Instagrammers across the country are hashtagging #NewAge and posting pics of infinite varietals of quartz and Ayurvedic yoga poses. Witches are back. So are horoscopes. And on the last day of last month, Chaz Bundick teamed up with the the Mattson 2 twins to release Star Stuff, an album of ecstatic—dare I say mood-altering—jazz.

The trio sold out New York’s Bowery Ballroom on Sunday, their first time onstage together playing the album. They’re all experienced musicians: Bundick’s most well-known project, Toro Y Moi, got famous for playing “chillwave” before edging into more impressionistic indie rock; the Mattson twins, Jared and Jonathan, have been playing together literally all of their lives, and have five albums of sun-splashed surf rock. And while they told me later they’d only started rehearsing the week before, I was shocked to see music this heady look so effortless on stage. With a simple combination of drums, electric guitar, and Bundick alternating between synths and bass, the music blurred into an astral swirl of jazzy psychedelia. The highlight: a nearly seven-minute psych jam, “Son Moi,” that sounded like earthily riffed desert music escalating and ascending into a celestial plane. Psych goes to space; chillwave goes sublime.

But let’s start at the beginning.

“The only glasses I like are clear,” Bundick said, shortly before one of the Mattsons tells me he’d gotten LASIK. Bundick has always dressed adventurously, but his signature clear-framed eyeglasses had been a constant. “Game changer, right? It’s 2017, why not?” He explains: When he first got glasses at age 8, he wasn’t into them because he didn’t want to be the nerdy kid at school. And then he got famous with them. “It’s like whenever you grow a mustache or something, and then you’re like, I don’t want to be known as the guy with the mustache… should I shave it off?” And then he said what I didn’t expect him to say: “This is the real me.” Chaz Bundick is a guy who doesn’t identify with wearing glasses, so he got rid of them. When they play with him, the Mattson twins shed the trademark black suits they’ve been wearing for approximately forever in favor of brightly patterned Hawaiian shirts.

Which is as good a way as any to describe Star Stuff, and, actually, Chaz Bundick Meets the Mattson 2 itself. The music is a small but significant departure from what we’ve heard from either group before. Like an outfit change.

For the Mattsons, Star Stuff was a chance to flex their pop muscles and try something genuinely new for them. “Chaz was like: ‘Hey Jared… have you ever considered, like, not using reverb?’” Jared told me. He took Bundick’s advice, made a leap of faith. “And in my mind that kind of made the record for me,” he said.

For Bundick, the album is an attempt at “pushing, like, musicianship in pop music.” This new direction might also represent a change for Toro Y Moi; that project started as electronic noodling, then, after a few albums, transitioned into live instrumentation. Which was a shock at the time. But his new focus on hyper-technical instrumentation doesn’t mean he’s abandoning his electronic roots; chillwave, he says, is “alive and well,” but “that word hasn’t come out of my mouth in a while.” He’s definitely still interested in electronic music and ’80s synths: “That world is definitely not dead for me,” Bundick adds. With the Mattsons, it looks like he is beginning to fuse both of those worlds—slippery synths combined with warm, live guitar and drum.

While Star Stuff is a stylistic departure for both bands, both see it as a kind of meditation on space—cosmic and claustrophobic. “The actual subject matter of your own mind’s perception,” Bundick says. It’s about carrying yourself through the universe. But the group says the album does have a kind of politics. “This record couldn’t have come out at a more perfect time. With this political climate, to have a biracial group come out to make something very American, which is jazz,” Bundick adds. “It was almost a statement too, to record a jazz record.” From a group so otherworldly, that’s a reassuringly earthbound thing to hear.

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